Sirius/XM already has the Holly channel playing Christmas music and Halloween was just a couple weeks ago. It’s way too early! But…the clock IS ticking and there really are only 4 solid weeks left in 2017 to close some of those, “I’ll get to them later” deals.

This Thursday The Fillmore Group will deliver a webinar for IBM sellers willing to consider collaborating with a Business Partner. We understand many sellers have heard about – or experienced – unsuccessful teaming with a partner. Join us to overcome your fears!

In this session we will *try* to explain that not all partners are alike, and some (like The Fillmore Group) can help you close deals by extending your reach and helping with challenging technical situations (which product is the “right” one?), arcane licensing and packaging research, and using an implementation discussion to address a customer’s concerns about the cost of services and education (yes Oracle takeout opportunities, I’m talking about you!)

IBM program challenges that impact Business Partners will also be explained, so that IBM sellers understand why partners get so antsy about keeping the lines of communication wide open – and getting added to sales records.

All in 30 fast minutes.

If you are an IBM seller who would love to close an extra deal or two before year end, please join us. If you aren’t an IBM seller, please join us for another webinar; this one is just for sellers.

The session will take place on Thursday, November 16th from 11:00am – 11:30am EST. Register HERE.

Frank Fillmore just finished delivering a webcast with IBM’s Steve Mink and Doug Anderson, hosted by Blanca Borden, on the just-released QMF Analytics for Multiplatforms solution. For the many QMF for z users, this new GUI-based solution offers the opportunity to extend the use of the objects, forms, queries, etc., an organization has developed over the years. The session was recorded and I will post the recording link as soon as it’s available to view.

For the September 13th Baltimore/Washington Db2 Users Group Frank will reprise his presentation and deliver a demo on QMF Analytics for Multiplatforms. The meeting is being sponsored by SEGUS and will include 4 presentations – 2 from SEGUS’s Ulf Heinrich and 1 from IBM’s John Iczkovits in addition to Frank’s. Summary session abstracts are below. Complete abstracts, speaker bio’s and registration information will be available later this week on the Baltimore/Washington DB2 Users Group website (www.bwdb2ug.org). I hope you will join us if you are in the area!

Audit and Compliance is one of the big challenges companies are facing these days. This presentation shows how the entire DB2 workload can be tracked without the overhead of a trace, or monitor, enabling to answer Who did What When ? whenever needed.

Session 2: Ulf Heinrich – Db2 12 Continuous Delivery

Starting with version 12 Db2 goes agile and code fixes, as well as new features and functions, will be delivered in a continuous stream, so called Continuous Delivery. While this change intends to make new technology available faster than in a three-year cycle it will also differ from how we did DB2 migration and testing before. This presentation provides an overview about Db2 Levels and how they affect the Db2 subsystem, the
Catalog/Directory, SQL and DDL. More importantly, you will see how changes can be applied safely and what levels of quality assurance and testing can be passed to assure Continuous Delivery goes well with Continuous Availability.

Session 3: John Iczkovits – DB2 for z/OS is in The Cloud! Using z/OSMF to Install, Migrate, and Provision DB2

These are exciting times and you may not realize it, but Db2 for z/OS is in the cloud! You may be thinking, what exactly does that mean? Many of your z/OS colleagues are already using z/OSMF for all sorts of functions. Come learn how to use z/OSMF to manage Db2 software, install, migrate, and provision data for Db2 and what the cloud means to us.

Session 4: Frank Fillmore – QMF Analytics for Multiplatforms

In July, QMF Analytics for Multiplatforms became generally available. Like QMF for z/OS, this solution delivers QMF’s visualization, dash boarding and graphical ad-hoc query capabilities, and enables users to leverage their existing QMF assets – queries, forms, procs from legacy QMF. In this session Frank Fillmore will provide an overview of the features of QMF Analytics for Multiplatforms and perform a demonstration that includes new updates to QMF’s data visualization interface.

In July QMF Analytics for Multiplatforms became generally available. This distributed platform only solution is aimed at customers that had inquired about QMF’s visualization, dashboarding and graphical ad-hoc query capabilities on non-z/OS platforms.

Join us in this webcast where Frank Fillmore will highlight how QMF Analytics for Multiplatforms is being used by one of his customers to modernize their operations.

We also will discuss in more detail the features of QMF Analytics for Multiplatforms and will conclude with a demonstration by Doug Anderson that will include the new updates to QMF’s data visualization interface.

I just received an email from IBM’s Partnerworld program notifying me that as of August 1, 2017, The Fillmore Group, after ten years as a Premier IBM Business Partner (the highest program level), is now officially a Registered Business Partner, the lowest level in the program.

We still have a team of expert consultants. We are still authorized to deliver most IBM courses in the Analytics brand family curriculum. We are still actively promoting, influencing and reselling IBM Analytics solutions. I am still Chair of the Baltimore/Washington DB2 Users Group and an IBM Champion. Frank is still a Gold Consultant. Several of our consultants are IBM Champions and Golds. IBM simply won’t programmatically acknowledge that our skills have value any longer.

IBM claims to value partners with skills, but by they are lying. The truth is the two factors determining partner level in the new Partnerworld system are software sales and customer references.

Is it a coincidence that IBM is struggling with sales (21 straight quarters of declining revenues) and the company has historically been terrible at getting customer references? Sadly, great technology followed by poor quality and expensive implementations and enablement support don’t add up to gushy customer success stories.

In the new program, without sales of $1,000,000 or more in a single product family a Business Partner cannot be granted a product “Competency” designation – no matter how many times they have implemented a solution, how many customers they have trained, and/or how many presentations and webinars they have delivered to help current and prospective customers understand the value of IBM’s solutions.

In the new IBM world, that’s not “competency”.

So like many of IBM’s “reinvention” efforts over the past five years, the “new” Partnerworld program is essentially the same old program, with new, onerous requirements designed to eliminate specialty partners (like The Fillmore Group) and I suppose reduce IBM’s burden of managing their partner network.

Because like who needs an extensive network of partners promoting an incredibly complex portfolio of products and solutions?? Heck, why not just funnel business to a handful of partner organizations and keep things simple. Maybe reduce channel support headcount by 10 or 15 people. Woohoo. Think small.

After I received the email notifying me of our program level demotion I tried to log in to Partnerworld to review the program offerings for our new, low level. And like so many things in today’s IBM world, the response was sad, heartbreaking and terribly frustrating – apparently they can’t keep the program website up. Need a high availability solution???

I am pleased to report a team of four consultants from The Fillmore Group, a team with over 100 years of combined DB2 experience, recently completed a successful migration of the courts system database at Lake County, Illinois.

The migration was spurred by an all-too-familiar challenge: retirement announcements by three long-time, key technical personnel and a recognized need to modernize their database to enable potential use of Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) application software.

The entire project, including new DB2 for z/Linux (LUW) DBA training, re-integration of several archived databases and migration of the customer’s extensive library of QMF reports, was estimated at 18 months and completed in 9. Under Frank Fillmore’s direction, the team utilized resources as needed: part-time and full-time, remote and at the customer site. The production cutover Memorial Day weekend went smoothly.

Lake County’s court system database is now running DB2 V11.1 on an Integrated Facility for z/Linux (IFL) on their IBM z Systems BC12. Their DB2 software license costs were under $10K. Most importantly, they are now prepared to begin evaluating application modernization options.

Congratulations to Suresh, Roger, Jim and Frank.

If your team is looking for migration support, please contact me. These DB2 experts like to keep busy!

With IBM’s announcement this week of super-aggressive discounting being offered to current Oracle customers considering a move to DB2, and with the deadline looming for many Oracle customers faced with another year of bloated “investment” in Oracle support, we’ve decided to deliver updated material on the benefits of moving to DB2.

Our upcoming webinar, “Oracle Renewal Looming? Consider DB2!” will be delivered on Tuesday, May 16th, from 11:30am to 12:30pm EDT.

DB2 Gold Consultant Frank Fillmore will join me for the session, as will IBM’s Tony Mancini, Worldwide Competitive Team Executive. Tony will give us a brief overview of IBM’s recent announcement, and Frank and I will deliver a fast-paced, interactive 60-minute session that will (we hope!) provide current Oracle customers with an understanding of both the cost savings and incredible database functionality available with DB2.

The next IBM-sponsored DB2 Analytics Accelerator Users’ Group meeting was announced this week. The Fillmore Group’s Frank Fillmore will be presenting one of the sessions, along with BNY/Mellon Pershing’s Al DiGiovanni, whose support and promotion of the IDAA enabled Pershing to acquire their first IDAA.

Al and Frank will be presenting the meeting’s final session titled, “Increasing Utilization of the Accelerator by your Lines of Business”, a session whose topic has been a core issue for System z customers trying to persuade their colleagues to consider investing in the IDAA.

As many technical teams promoting IDAA adoption have learned (the hard way!), most organizations adopted the circa-Y2K best practice of running OLTP and analytic workloads separately, and are therefore reluctant to re-integrate the two, in spite of the cost, latency and simplicity advantages. This session is designed to surface the issue and discuss options to address and overcome it.

Information on the DAAUG meeting is below. Please be advised that membership in this group is limited to current IDAA customers and registration to attend is managed by IBM. If you own an IDAA and would like to attend, and have not received an email invitation from IBM, please email me (kim.may@thefillmoregroup.com) and I will connect you to the IBM team coordinating the meeting.

The IDAA is a powerful tool for performing real-time analytics on z/OS transactional data. In many cases it is left to the managers of an enterprise’s mainframe to “sell” an IDAA to lines of business (LOBs).

The audience for the sales pitch: CFOs, CTOs, Enterprise IT Architects, Data Scientists

During this meeting, Ute Baumbach, subject matter expert from the Analytics on z Systems Center of Excellence out of Boeblingen, Germany, will cover the most recently introduced Accelerator features, functions and fixes. Tim Willging, Distinguished Engineer, will discuss how you can expand your Accelerator use cases with new functionality in the Accelerator Loader Tool. Jonathan Sloan, Business Analytics Executive Consultant, will present ways the Accelerator complements IBM Machine Learning. Frank Fillmore, DB2 Gold Consultant of the Fillmore Group, and a customer presenter will share their successful experiences to help you promote the value of the Accelerator to your Lines of Business.

We encourage you to join the meeting in person if you are local. Web Meeting details will be provided for remote attendees.

The Fillmore Group is inviting organizations frustrated with rising Oracle costs to join us for a webinar focusing on the two primary motivations behind DB2 migrations: cost and functionality. Session attendees will perform a self-analysis to compare similar version license costs, and gain an understanding of the technical features included in DB2 for on-premise use – BLU, pureScale, and the Data Partitioning Feature – as well as a brief overview of cloud deployment and SaaS options.

Date: Thursday, April 6th

Time: 11:00am – 12:00pm EDT

The session also includes an overview of the migration process, as anyone considering a move needs to understand the time and effort involved.

Sound boring? It won’t be! The session will be delivered by IBM Champions Frank Fillmore and Kim May. Frank has participated in IBM’s annual “Break Free Forum” and Kim has worked with several Oracle customers exploring migrations to DB2. We understand this is a complicated comparison but will do our best to make the session entertaining without including too much Oracle bashing. But maybe a bit.

Frank has delivered similar classes in the past and looks forward to delivering this updated class featuring the recently announced IDAA V6.1. This class will combine material explaining why you should have an IDAA and how to use it (query acceleration, High Performance Storage Saver, loading non-DB2 data using the Rocket Loader tool), along with new material introducing new ways to extend your System z’s processing capabilities to the cloud and into the new world of HTAP – Hybrid Transaction Analytic Processing – with the latest IDAA release.

Class is free, however attendees are responsible for their travel and lodging expenses. IBM reps are invited to join us along with their customers. The Fillmore Group will provide a continental breakfast and lunch each day, and dinner Monday evening for attendees interested in joining us. Registration is required – please follow the link below to register.

Enhancing Value to the IDAA with the IBM Tools Ecosystem
• Assessment: What is the workload that would benefit from being accelerated?
• Optimization: How do I monitor and optimize a workload to take advantage of the Accelerator?
• Administration: Can I manage the Accelerator more effectively?

Many thanks to the IBM z Systems team – Annette Zawacki and Jim Reed in particular – for supporting and promoting Thursday’s webinar. We seem to have struck a nerve as the registrations reads like a “who’s who” list of System z customers.

We understand many organizations are facing pressure from management teams who believe “newer” solutions are better, and dealing with operational issues resulting from the aging workforce and accumulated “technology debt” brought on by years of reliable data processing on the mainframe. Who ever thought THAT would be a problem??

We are polishing the presentation and looking forward to assisting System z customers and colleagues with a proactive response plan. I hope you will join us – the session will be delivered from 11am-12:00pm EDT, Thursday, November 17th. Registration is required; register HERE.

Abstract:

Technology is all about innovation and everyone knows the mainframe is as old as dirt. Therefore, according to many CIO’s, now’s the time to move to something new, like maybe open source, in the cloud with some of those cute animals.

How can loyal System z users respond to this short-sighted “management by airline magazine” approach? Join us to learn tactics to win the battle of the best platform to trust with your organization’s critical data and applications. We will prepare you to respond to the “modernization” message with a clear and logical action plan that promotes organizational efficiency, cost savings – and sanity (the mainframe!!)

The 3 critical takeaways:

Locate, gather and excite your IBM z team.

Be smart, be bold. Understand the enemy – where management teams are hearing the mainframe is obsolete message and the specific issues to address.

Gather collateral to *wow* your colleagues. Learn where to get industry white papers, how to complete a System z cost analysis and schedule activities to address management’s concerns.

Facilitators:

Frank Fillmore: DB2 Gold Consultant Frank Fillmore has been working with System z customers throughout his 30 year career in IT. Most recently Frank has been working with IBM DB2 Analytics Accelerator (IDAA) customers and working with customers to leverage the value of the mainframe. Frank is also an IBM Champion.

Kim May: Kim May is the Vice President Business Development at The Fillmore Group, an IBM Business Partner specializing in IBM data management software and services. Kim is an IBM Champion and serves on the board of the Baltimore/Washington DB2 Users Group.